1 min readOriginally announced in 2023, Amazon's AI-powered Alexa - Remarkable Alexa - will now arrive in the "near future" according to CEO Andy Jassy.
The launch of this device has been tumultuous.
Back at the initial announcement in September 2023, Amazon said the changes to the model would start rolling out within "the coming months" through the company's preview program. At this time Amazon was reportedly working on its own AI for the device, dubbed Titan, but the project has been addled with issues. A former machine learning scientist working on the project, Mihail Eric, said on X that the division was “riddled with technical and bureaucratic problems.”
Rather than continuing down this sinkhole, Amazon partnered with Anthropic, and will primarily use Claude AI for the latest Alexa devices, but will still pull from a range of different models, Titan included. After that announcement, a mid-October release was earmarked, but it is now November so you can do the math on that one.
The initial "coming months" snowballed, and well here we are over a year later with no solid release date, still.
In an earnings call overnight, Jassy said Amazon was "continu[ing] to re-architect the brain of Alexa with a new set of foundation models." So how near the future of Alexa actually is, is still TBD.
